With widespread support at home and from Trump, his heir will take the fight to Lula in the 2026 presidential election
Four years have passed since Jair Bolsonaro laid out three possible denouements for his extraordinary political career, during which the oft-ridiculed fringe politician rose to become one of leading lights of the global populist right alongside Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump.
“Going to jail, being killed or victory,” predicted Brazil’s then president as he grappled with a deluge of political crises in August 2021.
Bolsonaro was right. A majority of Brazil’s supreme court judges found the 70-year-old guilty on Thursday of masterminding a failed military coup designed to stop the leftwing winner of the 2022 election, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, taking office.
“Nowhere in the world … has complete immunity against the virus of authoritarianism that creeps in insidiously, distilling its poison to contaminate freedoms and human rights,” Justice Cármen Lúcia Antunes Rocha told a courtroom in the capital, Brasília, as she cast the deciding vote.
